Manufacturing Consent: Faragism and the Hegemonic Struggle for Britain

This paper analyses ‘Faragism’, the right-wing populist movement associated with Nigel Farage, not as a transient political moment but as an evolving hegemonic project that has reshaped British politics. Drawing on Gramsci, and on subsequent elaborations by Hall, Laclau, and Mouffe, it develops a three-phase model explaining how such movements achieve durability through strategic adaptation, surviving the resolution of signature objectives by pivoting to new antagonisms while maintaining consistent populist mechanics. Phase one (1993–2016) established an anti-EU ‘war of position’ targeting supranational bureaucracy. Phase two (2018–2023) pivoted to civilisational politics, substituting cultural-religious threat for institutional antagonism after Brexit was achieved. Phase three (2023–present) represents the most sophisticated evolution: ‘diasporic civic nationalism’ incorporates minority figures into leadership positions, performing diversity while preserving exclusionary substance through ostensibly neutral civic criteria. The paper treats hegemony not as an achieved condition but as a perpetual process requiring renewal, performance, and management of internal contradictions. It integrates Ahmed's analysis of ‘diversity work’, Leidig's ‘civilising’ thesis, and Akkerman and Rooduijn's notion of ‘inclusionary populism’ to illuminate how recent revelations of continuity between early-phase racial ideology and current preformative diversity expose constitutive gaps that render evolved hegemony vulnerable. The paper also addresses the fragmented condition of counter-hegemonic forces, examining why anti-racist activism, faith-based mobilisation, and Labour's grassroots have so far failed to produce a coherent alternative common sense. The contribution lies in modelling populist hegemony as adaptive yet contradictory, simultaneously durable and brittle, generating the conditions of its own potential undoing.